Now You Can Join the Others, the second collection of poetry by Taije Silverman, traces the absurdities of desire, the shifting nature of grief, and the concentric circles of history and myth that ripple around motherhood and marriage. Set in cities around the world and on real and metaphorical islands, narratives slip between centuries and spaces: a Philadelphia bedroom and Berlin's Jewish Museum, a castle in Naples and a Chuck E. Cheese. Scenes of sexual and racial violence force an interrogation of words through a multiplicity of voices, and the othering of self becomes a shared, even reassuring alienation. From a sixteenth-century philosopher to a lecherous innkeeper in Modena, from the founding of Athens to the hatching of cicadas, this book investigates human, geological, and cyclical forms of time, suggesting that they are as material and evasive as language. Intricate, unexpected, and probing, Now You Can Join the Others is a radically candid, revelatory collection.
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(@lsupress, 16 November 2022, e-book, 106 pages, copy from the publisher via @ edelweiss_squad)
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I loved every poem in this striking collection. I enjoyed the poet's use of language and imagery. Each poem is very vivid, and several will stay with me for a while. The poems comes across as very personal and are powerful. I especially liked Grief, Orphan Letter, Long As We Both, The Night I Slept With My High School English Teacher and Where To Put It.
